I LOVE YOU DUDE

Age Range: 5 - 9

An odd little story from the wizard of odd. Our hero is a doodle, a graffito really, a skinny blue elephant with shoes on each of his four feet and “I love you Dude” inscribed over his head. He is conscious. He has adventures. He escapes from the newly whitewashed wall upon which he was made, plasters himself to a mug that a little girl drinks her milk from, escapes from the girl’s mean aunt, is beached (literally), dissed by the circus elephants and finally framed in gold at the museum. The cockeyed tale is told in Dude’s first-person voice, illustrated with Radunsky’s often-surreal multi-media images. It isn’t often that one gets these kinds of existential musings—Who am I? Why, and how, do I exist?—in a work for young people, but here, or there, it is. Moreover, it’s rather fun—in its way. (Picture book. 5-9)